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Django Blog Tutorial - the Next Generation - Part 1

My series of Django tutorials for building a blogging engine are by far the most popular posts I’ve ever written on here. I’ve had a lot of people contact me with questions or just to express their thanks, for which I’m very grateful!

However, these tutorials haven’t really aged well. I’ve since had the opportunity to use Django in a professional capacity, which has significantly improved my understanding of the framework and the whole Python ecosystem, and there’s a lot of best practices that I didn’t follow and now wish I had. There’s also been a few gotchas that have hindered a few people in the past that I’d like to have the opportunity to correct.

So, I’m therefore creating a brand new series of tutorials to remedy this situation. This series will cover exactly the same basic idea of using Django to build a blogging engine, but will expand on what the original series did in many ways. We will cover such additional topics as:

Using Twitter Bootstrap to make your blog look good without too much hassle

Using Virtualenv to sandbox your blog application

Using South to effectively manage changes to your database structure

Writing some simple unit tests

Deploying the finished application to Heroku

Ready? Let’s get started!

Getting everything set up

Now, first of all, I’m going to assume you’re using some variant of Unix, such as Linux or Mac OS X. I’m not saying you can’t follow this tutorial with Windows, but you’ll have a harder time, because Windows just isn’t as developer-friendly as Unix in general. A modern Linux distro like Ubuntu is generally pretty easy to use, and you can easily run it in Virtualbox, so if you use Windows I would recommend you use that to make things easier.

You should also have at least a basic grasp of the command line, such as how to create and navigate directories. You don’t have to be a wizard with it, though.

You also need a proper programmer’s text editor. I use Vim, but I freely admit that Vim has a very steep learning curve and you may have trouble picking it up at the same time as following this tutorial. Emacs is also a very powerful text editor, and if you like it, feel free to use it. If you haven’t yet found a programmer’s text editor you like, I suggest you check out Sublime Text, which is easy to get started with, but also very powerful, and can be used without purchasing a license. Don’t worry too much about your text editor - it’s not vitally import that you use what I use, just find one that works for you. That said, I will say one thing - DON’T use an IDE. IDE’s hide too many details from new users and make it harder to figure out what’s going on.

You will also need to ensure you have the following installed:

Python. I recommend installing Python 2.7, because you may have issues with Python 2.6, and Python 3 isn’t universally supported yet so you might have some issues with that

Virtualenv

Pip

Git

On most Linux distros, you can find packages for all of these items easily enough using your package manager. On Mac OS X, I recommend using Homebrew to install them, though if you have another package manager installed you can use that too. If you have issues with installing any of these, a quick Google search should be sufficient to resolve the issue.

Beginning work

With all that done, we’re ready to get started. Create a folder in a suitable place on your file system and switch into it. I generally keep a dedicated folder in my home directory called Projects to use for all of my projects, and give each project a folder within it - in this case the project is called django_tutorial_blog_ng.

Now, we’ll use Git to keep track of our source code. If you prefer Mercurial, feel free to use that, but this tutorial will assume use of Git, so you’ll want to adapt the commands used accordingly. Start tracking your project with the following command from the shell, when you’re in the project directory:

Every time you come back to work on this project, you’ll need to run the previous command to make sure you’re running the version of Python installed under venv/ rather than your system Python. You can tell it’s using this because your shell prompt will be prefixed with (venv).

Why do this? Well, it means you can install whatever version of a Python module you like, without having root access, and means the Python install you’re using will only have those modules you explicitly install, rather than all of those ones available with your operating system. For instance, you could have multiple projects using different versions of Django, rather than having to update a global installation of Django and potentially break existing applications.

Now that our virtualenv is set up, we’ll install Django, as well as several other useful Python modules. Run the following command:

$ pip install django-toolbelt South

A little explanation is called for here. The package django-toolbelt includes a number of packages we’ll be using, including Django, as well as Gunicorn (a simple web server we’ll use when the time comes to deploy the app to Heroku). South is a migration tool that is commonly used with Django - basically, if you make changes to existing models, Django doesn’t natively have the capacity to apply those changes (yet - native migrations are planned at some point in the future), so South can be used to apply those changes for you without having to either manually change the database structure or dump the database and rebuild it.

Please note that one of the packages, psycopg2, may fail if you don’t have PostgreSQL installed, but don’t worry about installing it. We’ll be using SQLite for developing the application locally, and we’ll be deploying the finished product to Heroku, which does have it installed.

Once the installation is complete, run the following command to record the new modules installed:

$ pip freeze > requirements.txt

The file requirements.txt will be created, which stores the packages and versions you have installed so that they can be easily recreated. If you had issues installing psycopg2, then here’s what your requirements.txt should look like - feel free to edit it manually to look like this, as when we deploy it to Heroku, it will need to be correct to ensure that our application can be deployed successfully:

Django==1.6.1

South==0.8.4

dj-database-url==0.2.2

dj-static==0.0.5

django-toolbelt==0.0.1

gunicorn==18.0

psycopg2==2.5.1

static==0.4

wsgiref==0.1.2

Next, we’ll commit these changes with Git:

$ git add requirements.txt

$ git commit -m 'Committed requirements'

Next we’ll add a .gitignore file to ignore our virtualenv - we want to keep this out of version control because it’s something specific to that install. We have all we need to recreate it so we don’t want to store it. In addition, we also want to ignore any compiled Python files (identifiable by the .pyc suffix):

venv/

*.pyc

Let’s commit that too:

$ git add .gitignore

$ git commit -m 'Added a gitignore file'

Now, let’s generate our project’s basic skeleton:

$ django-admin.py startproject django_tutorial_blog_ng .

This application skeleton includes a basic configuration which will be sufficient for now, but you will also want to add the SQLite database file to your .gitignore:

env/

*.pyc

db.sqlite3

Let’s commit what we’ve done:

$ git add .gitignore django_tutorial_blog_ng/ manage.py

$ git commit -m 'Created project skeleton'

Now, before we create our database, we need to ensure we are using South. Go into django_tutorial_blog_ng/settings.py and find INSTALLED_APPS. Edit it to look like this:

INSTALLED_APPS = (

'django.contrib.admin',

'django.contrib.auth',

'django.contrib.contenttypes',

'django.contrib.sessions',

'django.contrib.messages',

'django.contrib.staticfiles',

'south',

)

Now, you can create your database. Run the following command:

$ python manage.py syncdb

You’ll be prompted to create a superuser - go ahead and fill in the details. Now, run the following command:

$ python manage.py runserver

This will run Django’s built-in web server on port 8000, and if you click here, you should see a page congratulating you on your first Django-powered page. Once you’re finished with it, you can stop the web server with Ctrl-C.

Don’t forget to commit your changes:

$ git add django_tutorial_blog_ng/settings.py

$ git commit -m 'Added South to installed apps'

Your first app

Django distinguishes between the concepts of projects and apps. A project is a specific project that may consist of one or more apps, such as a web app, whereas an app is a set of functionality within a project. For instance, one website might include some flat pages, an admin interface, and a blogging engine, and these could easily be different apps. By encouraging you to separate different types of functionality into different apps, Django makes it easier for you to reuse existing content elsewhere.

We’re going to create our first app, which is the blogging engine. Run the following command to create a basic skeleton for this app:

$ python manage.py startapp blogengine

Next, we need to amend our settings to install this app:

INSTALLED_APPS = (

'django.contrib.admin',

'django.contrib.auth',

'django.contrib.contenttypes',

'django.contrib.sessions',

'django.contrib.messages',

'django.contrib.staticfiles',

'south',

'blogengine',

)

Now, before we can use this app, we want to let South know about it so that changes to your database structure will be managed right from the start by South. Run the following command to create your initial migration:

$ python manage.py schemamigration --initial blogengine

That creates the file for your first migration,but doesn’t run it. To migrate your database structure to the latest version, run the following:

$ python manage.py migrate

This won’t actually make any changes, but it will ensure that all future changes to your models for the blogengine app are handled by South. Let’s commit our app skeleton:

$ git add django_tutorial_blog_ng/settings.py blogengine/

$ git commit -m 'Added blogengine app skeleton'

So, we now have our first app set up, but it doesn’t do anything much.

Remember that I mentioned how Django differentiates between projects and apps? Well, Django actually ships with a number of useful apps, and one of those is the admin interface. I consider the Django admin to be one of the framework’s killer features because it’s easy to use and customise, and saves you a lot of grief.

In the past, the admin interface needed a little work to get it working, but in Django 1.6 it’s configured to work out of the box, so if you click here, you should see the login screen for it. You should be able to sign in using the username and password you set when you ran syncdb.

Next, we’ll set up our first model.

An introduction to MVC

MVC is a common pattern used in web development. Many web development frameworks can be loosely described as MVC, including Django, Rails, CodeIgniter, Laravel and Symfony, as well as some client-side frameworks like Backbone.js. The basic concept is that a web app is divided into three basic components:

Models - the data managed with the application

Views - the presentation of the data

Controllers - an intermediary between the models and the views

Now, Django’s interpretation of MVC is slightly different to many other frameworks. While in most frameworks the views are HTML templates for rendering the data, in Django this role is taken by the templates, and the views are functions or objects that render data from the models using a template. Effectively, you can think of Django’s views as being like controllers in other frameworks, and Django templates as being views.

In Django, you create your models as Python classes that represent your data, and you use the Django ORM to query the database. As a result, it’s rare to have to directly query your database using SQL, making it more portable between different databases.

Now, our first model is going to be of a blog post. At least initially, each post will have the following attributes:

A title

A publication date and time

Some text

Now, we could just jump straight into creating our first model, but we’re going to make a point of following the practices of test-driven development here. The basic concept of TDD is that you write a failing test before writing any code, then you write the code to pass that test afterwards. It does make things a bit slower, but it’s all too easy to neglect writing tests at all if you leave it till later.

If you take a look in the blogengine folder you’ll notice there’s a file called tests.py. Open it up and you should see the following:

from django.test import TestCase

# Create your tests here.

It’s worth taking a little time to plan out what we want to test from our post model. Each post object will have the attributes I mentioned above, and what we want to be able to do is test that we can:

Set the title

Set the publication date and time

Set the text

Save it successfully

Retrieve it successfully

So, let’s create a test for our post model. We’ll go through the relevant sections of the test bit by bit:

from django.test import TestCase

from django.utils import timezone

from blogengine.models import Post

Here we’re importing the required functionality. TestCase is provided by Django, and is an object all of your tests should inherit from. timezone is a utility for handling dates and times correctly. Finally, Post is our model, which we have yet to implement.

# Create your tests here.

classPostTest(TestCase):

deftest_create_post(self):

# Create the post

post = Post()

Here we create the PostTest class, which represents a test for your Post model. So far it only has one method, but you can add additional ones if required.

# Set the attributes

post.title = 'My first post'

post.text = 'This is my first blog post'

post.pub_date = timezone.now()

Here we set the post’s attributes.

# Save it

post.save()

Now we save it. At this point it has been added to the database, and the rest of the test involves us ensuring it has been saved correctly and can be retrieved.

# Check we can find it

all_posts = Post.objects.all()

self.assertEquals(len(all_posts), 1)

only_post = all_posts[0]

self.assertEquals(only_post, post)

Here we use the Django database API to fetch all of the Post objects, assert that there is only 1 post object, retrieve that post object, and assert that it is the same object as the post object we just saved.

If unit testing is new to you, assertions may be new to you. Essentially you’re saying to the Python interpreter, “I assert that X is true, so please raise an error if this is not true”. Here we assert that the length of the variable all_posts is 1, and that that post is the same object as the previously saved object, so that the test will fail if that is not the case.

# Check attributes

self.assertEquals(only_post.title, 'My first post')

self.assertEquals(only_post.text, 'This is my first blog post')

self.assertEquals(only_post.pub_date.day, post.pub_date.day)

self.assertEquals(only_post.pub_date.month, post.pub_date.month)

self.assertEquals(only_post.pub_date.year, post.pub_date.year)

self.assertEquals(only_post.pub_date.hour, post.pub_date.hour)

self.assertEquals(only_post.pub_date.minute, post.pub_date.minute)

self.assertEquals(only_post.pub_date.second, post.pub_date.second)

Finally, we assert that the values of each of the post’s attributes as stored in the database match up with those in the post object we set. For the title and text fields, these are easy to validate as we can just check the values against those we set. For the pub_date field, things are a bit more complex, since this will be an object in its own right, so you need to check the day, month, year, hour, minute and second attributes separately.

The whole thing should look like this:

from django.test import TestCase

from django.utils import timezone

from blogengine.models import Post

# Create your tests here.

classPostTest(TestCase):

deftest_create_post(self):

# Create the post

post = Post()

# Set the attributes

post.title = 'My first post'

post.text = 'This is my first blog post'

post.pub_date = timezone.now()

# Save it

post.save()

# Check we can find it

all_posts = Post.objects.all()

self.assertEquals(len(all_posts), 1)

only_post = all_posts[0]

self.assertEquals(only_post, post)

# Check attributes

self.assertEquals(only_post.title, 'My first post')

self.assertEquals(only_post.text, 'This is my first blog post')

self.assertEquals(only_post.pub_date.day, post.pub_date.day)

self.assertEquals(only_post.pub_date.month, post.pub_date.month)

self.assertEquals(only_post.pub_date.year, post.pub_date.year)

self.assertEquals(only_post.pub_date.hour, post.pub_date.hour)

self.assertEquals(only_post.pub_date.minute, post.pub_date.minute)

self.assertEquals(only_post.pub_date.second, post.pub_date.second)

With that in place, the time has come to run our test with the following command:

Don’t worry about the error - this is exactly what we expect to see because we haven’t implemented our Post model yet. Now that we have a failing test in place, we can implement our model to make the test pass. Open up blogengine/models.py and enter the following:

Our test still fails, but if we take a look at this error message, we can see why - there is no database table for the posts (called blogengine_post). Using South, we can easily remedy that by creating a new migration to create this table:

Success! We now have a model in place that passes our test. Let’s commit our changes:

$ git add blogengine/

$ git commit -m 'Added post model with passing test'

Now, Django’s ORM is basically a layer on top of SQL that abstracts away differences between different relational databases, but the underlying queries are still being run. You can view the SQL created to generate the table by using the sqlall command. Just run python manage.py sqlall blogengine and you should see something like this:

BEGIN;

CREATETABLE"blogengine_post" (

"id"integerNOTNULL PRIMARY KEY,

"title"varchar(200) NOTNULL,

"pub_date" datetime NOTNULL,

"text"textNOTNULL

)

;

COMMIT;

Note the addition of the id field as the primary key. If you’re at all familiar with relational databases, you’ll know that every table must have one field, called a primary key, that is a unique reference to that row. This can be overridden, but here it’s exactly the behaviour we want.

Creating blog posts via the admin

Now, we need a way to be able to create, edit and delete blog posts. Django’s admin interface allows us to do so easily. However, before we do so, we want to create automated acceptance tests for this functionality, in order to test the ability to create posts from an end-user’s perspective. While unit tests are for testing sections of an application’s functionality from the perspective of other sections of the application, acceptance tests are testing from the user’s perspective. In other words, they test what the application needs to do to be acceptable.

First, we will test logging into the admin. Open up blogengine/tests.py and amend it as follows:

from django.test import TestCase, LiveServerTestCase, Client

from django.utils import timezone

from blogengine.models import Post

# Create your tests here.

classPostTest(TestCase):

deftest_create_post(self):

# Create the post

post = Post()

# Set the attributes

post.title = 'My first post'

post.text = 'This is my first blog post'

post.pub_date = timezone.now()

# Save it

post.save()

# Check we can find it

all_posts = Post.objects.all()

self.assertEquals(len(all_posts), 1)

only_post = all_posts[0]

self.assertEquals(only_post, post)

# Check attributes

self.assertEquals(only_post.title, 'My first post')

self.assertEquals(only_post.text, 'This is my first blog post')

self.assertEquals(only_post.pub_date.day, post.pub_date.day)

self.assertEquals(only_post.pub_date.month, post.pub_date.month)

self.assertEquals(only_post.pub_date.year, post.pub_date.year)

self.assertEquals(only_post.pub_date.hour, post.pub_date.hour)

self.assertEquals(only_post.pub_date.minute, post.pub_date.minute)

self.assertEquals(only_post.pub_date.second, post.pub_date.second)

classAdminTest(LiveServerTestCase):

deftest_login(self):

# Create client

c = Client()

# Get login page

response = c.get('/admin/')

# Check response code

self.assertEquals(response.status_code, 200)

First of all, we import two new objects from django.test, LiveServerTestCase and Client. Then we create the first part of our first test for the admin, named AdminTest. Eventually, this will test that we can log successfully into the admin interface. For now, we’re just doing the following:

Creating a Client object

Fetching the /admin/ route

Asserting that the status code for this HTTP request is 200, (in other words, that the page was fetched successfully).

If you run python manage.py test, you should see that both tests pass successfully. Now we’ll extend AdminTest - we’ll verify that the response contains the string ‘Log in’, which in the Django admin interface, appears on the login page:

classAdminTest(LiveServerTestCase):

deftest_login(self):

# Create client

c = Client()

# Get login page

response = c.get('/admin/')

# Check response code

self.assertEquals(response.status_code, 200)

# Check 'Log in' in response

self.assertTrue('Log in'in response.content)

Here response.content is a string containing the content of the HTTP response - we’re asserting that the substring ‘Log in’ appears in there. If you run python manage.py test again, it should pass.

Now, we need to actually log in. This could be fiddly, but Django has a handy convenience method to log you in when testing:

classAdminTest(LiveServerTestCase):

deftest_login(self):

# Create client

c = Client()

# Get login page

response = c.get('/admin/')

# Check response code

self.assertEquals(response.status_code, 200)

# Check 'Log in' in response

self.assertTrue('Log in'in response.content)

# Log the user in

c.login(username='bobsmith', password="password")

# Check response code

response = c.get('/admin/')

self.assertEquals(response.status_code, 200)

# Check 'Log out' in response

self.assertTrue('Log out'in response.content)

Here, we use the login method of the Client object to log into the admin interface, and then we fetch the /admin/ route again. We assert that we get a 200 status code, and we assert that the response contains the string ‘Log out’ - in other words, that we are logged in.

Try running python manage.py test and we’ll get an error., because the user details we’ve used to log in don’t exist. Let’s resolve that.

Now, you could put your own credentials in there, but that’s not a good idea because it’s a security risk. Instead, we’ll create a fixture for the test user that will be loaded when the tests are run. Run the following command:

$ python manage.py createsuperuser

Give the username as bobsmith, the email address as bob@example.com, and the password as password. Once that’s done, run these commands to dump the existing users to a fixture:

This will dump all of the existing users to blogengine/fixtures/users.json. You may wish to edit this file to remove your own superuser account and leave only the newly created one in there.

Next we need to amend our test to load this fixture:

classAdminTest(LiveServerTestCase):

fixtures = ['users.json']

deftest_login(self):

# Create client

c = Client()

# Get login page

response = c.get('/admin/')

# Check response code

self.assertEquals(response.status_code, 200)

# Check 'Log in' in response

self.assertTrue('Log in'in response.content)

# Log the user in

c.login(username='bobsmith', password="password")

# Check response code

response = c.get('/admin/')

self.assertEquals(response.status_code, 200)

# Check 'Log out' in response

self.assertTrue('Log out'in response.content)

Now, if you run python manage.py test, you should find that the test passes. Next, we’ll test that we can log out:

classAdminTest(LiveServerTestCase):

fixtures = ['users.json']

deftest_login(self):

# Create client

c = Client()

# Get login page

response = c.get('/admin/')

# Check response code

self.assertEquals(response.status_code, 200)

# Check 'Log in' in response

self.assertTrue('Log in'in response.content)

# Log the user in

c.login(username='bobsmith', password="password")

# Check response code

response = c.get('/admin/')

self.assertEquals(response.status_code, 200)

# Check 'Log out' in response

self.assertTrue('Log out'in response.content)

deftest_logout(self):

# Create client

c = Client()

# Log in

c.login(username='bobsmith', password="password")

# Check response code

response = c.get('/admin/')

self.assertEquals(response.status_code, 200)

# Check 'Log out' in response

self.assertTrue('Log out'in response.content)

# Log out

c.logout()

# Check response code

response = c.get('/admin/')

self.assertEquals(response.status_code, 200)

# Check 'Log in' in response

self.assertTrue('Log in'in response.content)

This test works along very similar lines. We log in, verify that ‘Log out’ is in the response, then we log out, and verify that ‘Log in’ is in the response. Run the tests again, and they should pass. Assuming they do, let’s commit our changes again:

$ git add blogengine/

$ git commit -m 'Added tests for admin auth'

This code is a little repetitive. We create the client twice, when we could do so only once. Amend the AdminTest class as follows:

classAdminTest(LiveServerTestCase):

fixtures = ['users.json']

defsetUp(self):

self.client = Client()

deftest_login(self):

# Get login page

response = self.client.get('/admin/')

# Check response code

self.assertEquals(response.status_code, 200)

# Check 'Log in' in response

self.assertTrue('Log in'in response.content)

# Log the user in

self.client.login(username='bobsmith', password="password")

# Check response code

response = self.client.get('/admin/')

self.assertEquals(response.status_code, 200)

# Check 'Log out' in response

self.assertTrue('Log out'in response.content)

deftest_logout(self):

# Log in

self.client.login(username='bobsmith', password="password")

# Check response code

response = self.client.get('/admin/')

self.assertEquals(response.status_code, 200)

# Check 'Log out' in response

self.assertTrue('Log out'in response.content)

# Log out

self.client.logout()

# Check response code

response = self.client.get('/admin/')

self.assertEquals(response.status_code, 200)

# Check 'Log in' in response

self.assertTrue('Log in'in response.content)

The setUp() method is automatically run when the test runs, and ensures we only need to start up the client once. Run your tests to make sure they pass, then commit your changes:

$ git add blogengine/

$ git commit -m 'Refactored admin test'

Now, we’ll implement a test for creating a new post. The admin interface implements URLs for creating new instances of a model in a consistent format of /admin/app_name/model_name/add/, so the URL for adding a new post will be /admin/blogengine/post/add/.

Add this method to the AdminTest class:

deftest_create_post(self):

# Log in

self.client.login(username='bobsmith', password="password")

# Check response code

response = self.client.get('/admin/blogengine/post/add/')

self.assertEquals(response.status_code, 200)

Try running it and this will fail, because we haven’t registered the Post model in the Django admin. So we need to do that. To do so, open a new file at blogengine/admin.py and add the following code:

import models

from django.contrib import admin

admin.site.register(models.Post)

Now, run python manage.py test and the test should pass. If you want to confirm that the post model appears in the admin, run python manage.py runserver and click here.

So now we can reach the page for adding a post, but we haven’t yet tested that we can submit one. Let’s remedy that:

deftest_create_post(self):

# Log in

self.client.login(username='bobsmith', password="password")

# Check response code

response = self.client.get('/admin/blogengine/post/add/')

self.assertEquals(response.status_code, 200)

# Create the new post

response = self.client.post('/admin/blogengine/post/add/', {

'title': 'My first post',

'text': 'This is my first post',

'pub_date_0': '2013-12-28',

'pub_date_1': '22:00:04'

},

follow=True

)

self.assertEquals(response.status_code, 200)

# Check added successfully

self.assertTrue('added successfully'in response.content)

# Check new post now in database

all_posts = Post.objects.all()

self.assertEquals(len(all_posts), 1)

Here we submit the new post via HTTP POST, with all the data passed through. This mirrors the form created by the Django admin interface - if you take a look at the HTML generated by the admin, you’ll see that the inputs are given names that match these. Note that the pub_date field, because it represents a datetime object, is split up into a separate date and time field. Also note the parameter follow=True - this denotes that the test client should follow any HTTP redirect.

We confirm that the POST request responded with a 200 code, denoting success. We also confirm that the response included the phrase ‘added successfully’. Finally we confirm that there is now a single Post object in the database. Don’t worry about any existing content - Django creates a dedicated test database and destroys it after the tests are done, so you can be sure that no posts are present unless you explicitly load them from a fixture.

We can now test creating a post, but we also need to ensure we can test editing and deleting them. First we’ll add a test for editing posts:

deftest_edit_post(self):

# Create the post

post = Post()

post.title = 'My first post'

post.text = 'This is my first blog post'

post.pub_date = timezone.now()

post.save()

# Log in

self.client.login(username='bobsmith', password="password")

# Edit the post

response = self.client.post('/admin/blogengine/post/1/', {

'title': 'My second post',

'text': 'This is my second blog post',

'pub_date_0': '2013-12-28',

'pub_date_1': '22:00:04'

},

follow=True

)

self.assertEquals(response.status_code, 200)

# Check changed successfully

self.assertTrue('changed successfully'in response.content)

# Check post amended

all_posts = Post.objects.all()

self.assertEquals(len(all_posts), 1)

only_post = all_posts[0]

self.assertEquals(only_post.title, 'My second post')

self.assertEquals(only_post.text, 'This is my second blog post')

Here we create a new blog post, then verify we can edit it by resubmitting it with different values, and checking that we get the expected response, and that the data in the database has been updated. Run python manage.py test, and this should pass.

Finally, we’ll set up a test for deleting posts:

deftest_delete_post(self):

# Create the post

post = Post()

post.title = 'My first post'

post.text = 'This is my first blog post'

post.pub_date = timezone.now()

post.save()

# Check new post saved

all_posts = Post.objects.all()

self.assertEquals(len(all_posts), 1)

# Log in

self.client.login(username='bobsmith', password="password")

# Delete the post

response = self.client.post('/admin/blogengine/post/1/delete/', {

'post': 'yes'

}, follow=True)

self.assertEquals(response.status_code, 200)

# Check deleted successfully

self.assertTrue('deleted successfully'in response.content)

# Check post amended

all_posts = Post.objects.all()

self.assertEquals(len(all_posts), 0)

Again, this is pretty similar to what we did before. We create a new post, verify that it is the sole post in the database, and log into the admin. Then we delete the post via the admin, and confirm that the admin interface confirmed it has been deleted, and the post is gone from the database.

I think it’s now time to commit again:

$ git add blogengine/

$ git commit -m 'Post admin tests in place'

So we now know that we can create, edit and delete posts, and we have tests in place to confirm this. So our next task is to be able to display our posts.

For now, to keep things simple, we’re only going to implement the index view - in other words, all the posts in reverse chronological order. We’ll use Django’s generic views to keep things really easy.

Django’s generic views are another really handy feature. As mentioned earlier, a view is a function or class that describes how a specific route should render an object. Now, there are many tasks that recur in web development. For instance, many web pages you may have seen may be a list of objects - in this case, the index page for a blog is a list of blog posts. For that reason, Django has the ListView generic view, which makes it easy to render a list of objects.

Now, like before, we want to have a test in place. Open up blogengine/tests.py and add the following class at the end of the file:

classPostViewTest(LiveServerTestCase):

defsetUp(self):

self.client = Client()

deftest_index(self):

# Create the post

post = Post()

post.title = 'My first post'

post.text = 'This is my first blog post'

post.pub_date = timezone.now()

post.save()

# Check new post saved

all_posts = Post.objects.all()

self.assertEquals(len(all_posts), 1)

# Fetch the index

response = self.client.get('/')

self.assertEquals(response.status_code, 200)

# Check the post title is in the response

self.assertTrue(post.title in response.content)

# Check the post text is in the response

self.assertTrue(post.text in response.content)

# Check the post date is in the response

self.assertTrue(str(post.pub_date.year) in response.content)

self.assertTrue(post.pub_date.strftime('%b') in response.content)

self.assertTrue(str(post.pub_date.day) in response.content)

Here we create the post, and assert that it is the sole post object. We then fetch the index page, and assert that the HTTP status code is 200 (ie. the page exists and is returned). We then verify that the response contains the post title, text and publication date.

Note that for the month, we need to do a bit of jiggery-pokery to get the month name. By default Django will return short month names (eg Jan, Feb etc), but Python stores months as numbers, so we need to format it as a short month name using %b.

If you run this, you will get an error because the index route isn’t implemented. So let’s fix that. Open up the existing django_tutorial_blog_ng/urls.py file and amend it to look like this:

from django.conf.urls import patterns, include, url

from django.contrib import admin

admin.autodiscover()

urlpatterns = patterns('',

# Examples:

# url(r'^$', 'django_tutorial_blog_ng.views.home', name='home'),

# url(r'^blog/', include('blog.urls')),

url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),

# Blog URLs

url(r'^.*$', include('blogengine.urls')),

)

Then, create a new file at blogengine/urls.py and edit it as follows:

from django.conf.urls import patterns, url

from django.views.generic import ListView

from blogengine.models import Post

urlpatterns = patterns('',

# Index

url('^$', ListView.as_view(

model=Post,

)),

)

A little explanation is called for. The project has its own urls.py file that handles routing throughout the project. However, because Django encourages you to make your apps reusable, we want to keep the routes in the individual apps as far as possible. So, in the project file, we include the blogengine/urls.py file.

In the app-specific urls.py, we import the Post model and the ListView generic view. We then define a route for the index page - the regular expression ^$ will match only an empty string, so that page will be the index. For this route, we then call the as_view() method of the ListView object, and set the model as Post.

Now, if you either run the tests, or run the development server and visit the index page, you’ll see that it isn’t working yet - you should see the error TemplateDoesNotExist: blogengine/post_list.html. This tells us that we need to create a template called blogengine/post_list.html, so let’s do that. First of all, add the following at the end of django_tutorial_blog_ng/settings.py:

# Template directory

TEMPLATE_DIRS = [os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'templates')]

Next, create the folders for the templates, and a blank post_list.html file:

$ mkdir templates

$ mkdir templates/blogengine

$ touch templates/blogengine/post_list.html

Now, run your tests again, and you’ll see that the template now exists, but a new error is showing up:

To fix this, we make sure the template shows the data we want. Open up templates/blogengine/post_list.html and enter the following:

<html>

<head>

<title>My Django Blog</title>

</head>

<body>

{% for post in object_list %}

<h1>{{ post.title }}</h1>

<h3>{{ post.pub_date }}</h3>

{{ post.text }}

{% endfor %}

</body>

</html>

This is only a very basic template, and we’ll expand upon it in future.

With that done, you can run python manage.py test, and it should pass. Well done! Don’t forget to commit your changes:

$ git add django_tutorial_blog_ng/ templates/ blogengine/

$ git commit -m 'Implemented list view for posts'

And that’s all for this lesson! We’ve done a hell of a lot in this lesson - set up our project, created a comprehensive test suite for it, and implemented the basic functionality. Next time we’ll make it a bit prettier using Twitter Bootstrap, as well as implementing more of the basic functionality for the blog.

You can find the source code on Github. For your convenience, I’ve tagged this lesson as lesson-1, so you can just clone the repository and switch to the end of this lesson with the following commands:

About me

I'm a web and mobile app developer based in Norfolk. My skillset includes Python, PHP and Javascript, and I have extensive experience working with CodeIgniter, Laravel, Django, Phonegap and Angular.js.